‘Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings dearth.’
Augusta Leigh, the selfless martyr, the most loyal friend that Byron ever possessed, his ‘tower of strength in the hour of need,’ assisted her brother, so to speak, to place the pack on a false scent, and the whole field blindly followed. There never was a nobler example of self-immolation than that of the sister who bravely endured the odium of a scandal in which she had no part. For Byron’s sake she was content to suffer intensely during her lifetime; and after she had ceased to feel, her name was branded by Lady Byron and her descendants with the mark of infamy.
A curious feature in the case is that, with few exceptions, those who knew Byron and Mrs. Leigh intimately came gradually to accept the story which Lady Caroline Lamb had insidiously whispered, a libel which flourished exceedingly in the noxious vapours of a scandal-loving age. As Nature is said to abhor a vacuum, so falsehood rushed in to fill the void which silence caused.
It is with a deep searching of heart and with great reluctance that we re-open this painful subject.
The entire responsibility must rest with the late Lord Lovelace, whose loud accusation against Byron’s devoted sister deprives us of any choice in the matter.
In order to understand the full absurdity of the accusation brought against Augusta Leigh, we have but to contrast the evidence brought against her in ‘Astarte’ with allusions to her in Byron’s poems, and with the esteem in which she was held by men and women well known in society at the time of the separation.
Lord Stanhope, the historian, in a private letter written at the time of the Beecher Stowe scandals, says:
‘I was very well acquainted with Mrs. Leigh about forty years ago, and used to call upon her at St. James’s Palace to hear her speak about Lord Byron, as she was very fond of doing. That fact itself is a presumption against what is alleged, since, on such a supposition, the subject would surely be felt as painful and avoided. She was extremely unprepossessing in her person and appearance—more like a nun than anything—and never can have had the least pretension to beauty. I thought her shy and sensitive to a fault in her mind and character, and, from what I saw and knew of her, I hold her to have been utterly incapable of such a crime as Mrs. Beecher Stowe is so unwarrantably seeking to cast upon her memory.’
Frances, Lady Shelley, a woman of large experience, penetration, and sagacity, whose husband was a personal friend of the Prince Regent, stated in a letter to the Times that Mrs. Leigh was like a mother to Byron, and when she knew her intimately—at the time of the separation—was ‘not at all an attractive person.’ Her husband was very fond of her, and had a high opinion of her.
These impressions are confirmed by all those friends and acquaintances of Mrs. Leigh who were still living in 1869.